Oracle woes add up to more than a slacker salesforce
IT powers, including Oracle, face big time challenges as enterprise accounts reject old buying models and vendor lockin. Read more »
From Amazon’s top data geek: data has got to be big — and reproducible
photo: Albert Chau
Big data and the horsepower needed to generate, store and manage it is all great. Now we need to make sure our data is reproducible, says AWS principle data scientist. Read more »
Report: The CIA and Amazon are in cahoots over secret cloud
photo: Thinkstock
Who better to show the CIA how to build a cloud than Amazon Web Services? No one’s confirming anything but an AWS-CIA contract would make sense for both parties. Read more »
Sift Science says it can sniff out cyber fraud — before it gets expensive
Using machine language smarts to screen for a much wider array of fraudulent online behavior, startup Sift Science now has $5.5 million to broaden its beta test beyond a few select companies. Read more »
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How the mega data center is changing the hardware and data center markets
photo: Facebook
Mega data centers’ innovations in serviceability, automatically detecting and recovering from failures, procurement practices, and so forth will become standard practice in all modern data centers. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The week in cloud: VMware fesses up; Amazon adds features; Newvem watches Amazon
photo: Shutterstock / Gena96
It was a busy week in cloud as VMware took the wraps off its public cloud play; Newvem added still another way to watch your Amazon account; and Amazon itself churned out a ton of new AWS features. Read more »
By the numbers: How Google Compute Engine stacks up to Amazon EC2
When Google launched its EC2 rival, Google Compute Engine, last June, it set some high expectations. Sebastian Standil’s team at Scalr put the cloud infrastructure service through its paces — and were pleasantly surprised at what they found. Read more »
Report: IBM and EMC eye SoftLayer
photo: Flickr / mrs. tom
Softlayer may be in the cross hairs of not one but two legacy IT giants, according to a Reuters report. Even the idea that EMC or IBM would consider a buyout is interesting. Read more »
Netflix fronts $100K for best cloud ideas
photo: Flickr/401(K) 2012
Netflix wants to hear about your great cloud computing ideas and is willing to pay for the privilege. Read more »
Vagrant gets busy with VMware Fusion, Rackspace support
Version 1.1 of Vagrant, an open source tool for creating virtual development workspaces, is adding support for VMware Fusion and Rackspace Open Cloud. Read more »
Oracle buys private-cloud pioneer Nimbula
Oracle’s acquisition of Nimbula gives it some needed private-cloud savvy and a toehold in the OpenStack camp — should it choose to keep Nimbula’s product around. Read more »
VMware’s hybrid vCloud takes on Amazon. Kinda.
VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger sketches plans to take on Amazon Web Services in public cloud. Hint: The strategy keys on existing vCloud private cloud customers and the channel supporting them. Read more »
One secret about Ray Ozzie’s secretive startup is out: It will tap Amazon’s cloud
photo: Flickr/Will Merydith
Talko, a super-stealthy startup co-founded by Microsoft’s former chief software architect and strategist, will make use of Amazon Web Services. Read more »
Who’s the biggest cloud of all? The numbers are in
photo: Akamai
Synergy Research ranked the top Iaas, PaaS and CDN providers by revenue for the fourth quarter. Some of the findings might surprise you. Read more »
The week in cloud: VMware cloud saga continues; Amazon kicks up monitoring wars
photo: Shutterstock / Gena96
There was lots of chit-chat on what VMware could/should/would/will do about its Amazon public cloud problem, and Amazon raised a ruckus with a free preview of Trusted Advisor. Read more »
Amazon slices prices on DynamoDB database service
photo: Flickr/Will Merydith
Not a huge surprise: Amazon Web Services cut prices on its DynamoDB NoSQL database service just over a year after its launch. Read more »
Rackspace gussies up private cloud with new OpenCenter dashboard
Rackspace says its new dashboard, part of its latest OpenStack-based private cloud release, will speed up cloud rollouts and configuration tasks by adding point-and-click capabilities for enteprise users. Read more »
Finally: IBM drops the other OpenStack shoe
At its Pulse conference this week, Big Blue is finally providing some details about its OpenStack cloud implementation plans. Read more »
Look out below! Amazon offers free trial of Trusted Advisor monitoring tool
photo: Barb Darrow
A month-long free trial of the Amazon Web Services’ monitoring and alerting tool has to spook a raft of smaller companies offering similar services. Read more »
Exclusive: Markley Group adds cloud services to take on Amazon for business workloads
Boston-based data center provider adds on-demand cloud services to take on Amazon Web Services and other cloud providers for business workloads. Read more »
Gartner: Public cloud services to hit $131B by 2017
photo: Akamai
New Gartner predictions hold that the U.S. will remain number 1 in overall public cloud services deployment — by a wide margin — into 2016. Read more »
Exclusive: RightScale is first to resell, support Google Compute Engine
The RightScale-GCE deal gives RightScale early lead on capturing Google cloud customers and gives Google infrastructure credibility — and support — for business customers. Read more »
This week in cloud: Cloud as job creator, crazy times for Microsoft Azure storage
photo: Shutterstock / Gena96
IT folks who worry that cloud computing adoption will kill jobs, may be surprised by the results of a new survey; Amazon unveils OpsWorks; Rackspace makes price changes. Read more »
Google cloud grows up with more support options
Business customers who want more support than Google Groups or Stack Overflow for Google Cloud workloads can now choose from four tiers of Google-branded support. Read more »
Amazon gets (more) serious about the enterprise. No kidding
photo: Shutterstock/ tommistock
The fact that Amazon Web Services is targeting enterprise accounts is nothing new. The company’s just getting more blatant about it. Read more »
Amazon adds OpsWorks application life cycle management to AWS cloud
photo: Barb Darrow
Even folks who love using Amazon Web Services admit that it’s difficult to configure and manage them. That application management, some of which was handled by Chef and Puppet till now, is the problem OpsWorks takes on. Read more »
This week in cloud: Amazon upsets Apple; NTT backs Cloud Foundry; cloud taxes in dispute
photo: Shutterstock / Gena96
Amazon is numero uno in consumer appeal, beating out even Apple and Google, according to Harris Interactive. Also, Cloud Foundry gets big backer in NTT and states reconsider sales taxes on cloud services. Read more »
Watch out HP, IBM, Teradata, Oracle: Amazon Redshift is here
photo: Barb Darrow
Can Amazon take on the giants of data warehousing and win? Now we’ll be able to find out as its Paraccel-based Redshift service comes online. Read more »
Is Amazon yesterday’s cloud?
photo: Barb Darrow
ProfitBricks, which goes head-to-head with Amazon for the IT budgets of startups with a new promotion, says the time is ripe to disrupt the disrupter. Read more »
Amazon makes it cheaper to spread your database around
Amazon this week cut the prices on multi-availability zone deployments of its Relational Database Service. Read more »
Developers rejoice! Vagrant finds a home in the Amazon cloud
Hashicorp was already extending Vagrant into VMware virtualized environments and now it’s adding a connection into Amazon Web Services as well. This is good news for developers. Read more »
Amazon cloud spinoff talk crops up again
photo: Flickr/Will Merydith
Oppenheimer analyst Tim Horan says Amazon will have to spin off Amazon Web Services to attain the scale it needs. Read more »
Preventing a power outage during the Super Bowl: $4 million
Following the power outage during Sunday’s Super Bowl game, an Amazon Web Services engineer gave his blog readers some tips for avoiding similar events, at data centers or giant stadiums. Read more »
Cloudyn says it exposes hidden Amazon storage costs and you’d be surprised how big they are
photo: Flickr / getinet
Do you know how much Amazon storage you’re using? Do you really? Cloudyn says it can tell you the real data and recommend ways to cut costs. Read more »
Morphlabs’ OpenStack cloud to arm service providers against Amazon
photo: Shutterstock / Oleksiy Mark
For big service providers that feel “disrupted” by Amazon’s prodigious cloud, Morphlabs is pitching mCloud Osmium as a way to get up to snuff. Read more »
Amazon makes it cheaper to move your stuff between regions
photo: Flickr/Will Merydith
If you thought Amazon Web Services would stop churning out new features and cutting prices on older ones, you have another think coming. Read more »
Bezos: With ebook sales up 70% in 2012, Amazon has hit “transition” it expected
Amazon announced fourth-quarter and full year 2012 earnings report roughly in line with investor expectations Tuesday afternoon. Speaking of ebooks, CEO Jeff Bezos said, “We’re now seeing the transition we’ve been expecting.” Read more »
AWS launches transcoding service a week after Microsoft goes after media biz
Amazon has hopped into the video transcoding business with it’s new Elastic Transcoder service, joining Microsoft, Encoding.com and others as providers of such a service. Read more »
Server, meet hammer: It’s all cloud at AWS startup challenge
photo: Jordan Novet
Entrepreneurs spoke about the value of Amazon Web Services, took home prizes and destroyed servers at AWS’ sixth annual Global Start-Up Challenge event on Thursday. Read more »
AWS beefs up cloud for super-fast data processing
photo: Shutterstock / ssguy
Amazon Web Services has introduced its latest instance — an 88-core, 240 GB SSD, 244 GB RAM and 10 GbE behemoth designed for real-time analytics with software like SAP HANA, as well as demanding scientific workloads. Read more »
